The response that Luis Argüello offered in the Forum Nueva Economía to Laura Ramírez’s question about Vox deserves to be read slowly. It is an apparently meandering and pastoral text that encloses a precise argumentative architecture whose function is not to dialogue with the interlocutor, but to delegitimize them from a supposed doctrinal authority. It is worth dismantling it piece by piece, not out of a polemical zeal, but because the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference uses Catholic doctrine here to make it say what the doctrine does not say, or what it says with nuances that he suppresses.
Read also: What Argüello has said about immigration and ordo amoris: Full text
The first piece is also the most revealing, and it is where almost the entire ecclesiastical commentariat has skimmed over. Argüello opens his response like this: «irreconcilable positions I believe that in principle there are none with anyone». The phrase sounds conciliatory. It is, in reality, devastating. Because that «with anyone», pronounced by the president of the Spanish bishops in front of a Vox general secretary in the room, draws a tacit equivalence between all the political positions present in the Spanish spectrum. Vox, on the same plane of dialoguability as the Government that has approved euthanasia, the trans law, mass regularization by decree, and the legal entrenchment of abortion up to week 22. Vox, on the same plane as EH Bildu, the political heir to those who assassinated priests and parishioners in the Basque Country. Vox, on the same plane as Sumar and Podemos, who have made active antagonism against educational and religious freedom a banner. The equidistance is rhetorically comfortable and theologically unsustainable: there are positions, in politics as in morals, that are objectively irreconcilable with non-negotiable principles that Catholic doctrine itself has formulated with clarity. That a bishop does not want or does not know how to enunciate that boundary, preferring to take refuge in a universal dialogue without content, is not pastoral virtue: it is renunciation. And from that renunciation, everything else is built. He who has proclaimed that there is no fundamental disagreement with anyone then allows himself to paint the specific position of a specific party as heterodox. The initial equidistance was not symmetry: it was the rhetorical permission to disqualify the only interlocutor present in the room afterward.
Once the premise is established, the second operation begins: the semantic slippage from «poor» to «impoverished». Argüello insists: «the Church, with regard to issues that have to do with the impoverished, and I say impoverished, not just poor». The distinction is not innocent. It comes from the vocabulary of Latin American liberation theology from the seventies, and its technical function consists of converting poverty, which is a state, into a passive action: someone has been «impoverished», therefore there exists a guilty subject who has impoverished them. Before the debate begins, the moral framework is already set. The receiving nations of immigration are not interlocutors: they are structural culprits. He who speaks does so from the presumption of innocence; he who proposes a restrictive migration policy, from the presumption of guilt. The entire subsequent response is coherent with that silenced premise.
The third piece is the false symmetry between the «go» and the «come». «There are places in the world where people are being told ‘go’ and there are places in the world like ours, where people are being told ‘come’». It is rhetorically brilliant and descriptively true, but the cause that Argüello attributes to the «come»—«because we live in a demographic winter»—is false. Yes, there is a «come», but its origin is not the inverted demographic pyramid. It is a perfectly identifiable legal and welfare architecture. Universal health care extended in 2018 by Pedro Sánchez’s Government to immigrants in irregular situations. Free schooling guaranteed regardless of administrative status. The figure of arraigo—social, labor, family, and for training—that allows regularization after two or three years of irregular stay. The Popular Legislative Initiative for mass regularization, driven to a large extent by ecclesial structures and approved with broad parliamentary support. The system for receiving unaccompanied minors, financed by the autonomous communities. Access to the minimum vital income under certain conditions. Family reunifications with lax criteria. The effective migratory amnesty granted by decree in 2025 to more than half a million people. All of that constitutes an implicit «come», perfectly readable for origin networks and for trafficking mafias. The pull effect itself is a fact recognized by intelligence services and by Frontex, although its mention is vetoed in certain public vocabulary.
This subverts Argüello’s thesis more deeply than he himself warns. If the «come» were due to the demographic winter, it would be a structural destiny inevitable that only immigration could alleviate. But if the «come» is due to a set of concrete political and administrative decisions, then it is not a destiny: it is an option. And an option that can be reviewed, conditioned, or suppressed without that implying any offense to human dignity, because States, as Leo XIV himself has recalled, have the right to regulate their borders and to shape their welcome policies. The curious thing about the episcopal reasoning is that it naturalizes a political choice to present it as an anthropological necessity. Where there is politics, it sees demography. And where it sees demography, it prohibits political discussion.
To this is added the demographic fallacy proper. The fertility of immigrants converges with that of the receiving country in one generation, as shown by Eurostat studies and the INE itself. Replacing an inverted pyramid by importing young people who will also age is postponing the problem, not solving it. The net fiscal impact depends crucially on the level of qualification, and the Bank of Spain has documented that in low-profile cases it is usually negative in the medium term. The assertion that the only possible response to the demographic winter is immigration hides a prior political choice: that of not implementing natalist, family, and reconciliation policies of scope, a matter that the Church should know with some depth.
The fourth piece is the spurious structural causality between international trade and migration. Argüello deploys two images: the jacket designed in the United States and sewn in global South maquilas, and the balls with which Spanish top clubs play, «made in Pakistan by slave children». The details are plausible. The inference is not. Argüello assumes that trade explains migration: we consume what they produce poorly paid, so they come here. The data go in the opposite direction. Mexican maquilas, far from increasing migratory pressure toward the United States, have historically been one of the factors that contain it, because they offer employment at origin. Bangladesh, Vietnam, or Pakistan, main producers of cheap textile manufacturing, do not contribute significant migratory flows to Spain. The countries that do—Morocco, Senegal, Mali, Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras, Nicaragua—do so for very different reasons: violence, family networks, salary and benefits differentials, political crises. Reducing the causes of migration to the commercial guilt of the West is theologically comfortable and empirically poor. It allows evading what is truly uncomfortable: that many of the causes are endogenous to the countries of origin, and that international trade, far from being the cause of the exodus, is one of the mechanisms that the most rigorous economic literature has associated with the reduction of extreme poverty in the last three decades.
We thus arrive at the doctrinal core of the discourse, the fifth piece and the most delicate: the question of the Ordo Amoris. Argüello acknowledges that Leo XIV is interested in the matter, cites the two Castilian proverbs that convey the common sense of the order of love—«charity well understood begins with oneself», «no one touches the bread of my children»—and dismisses them as «partial reading» and as «trap». What he dismisses is not a Trumpist whim: it is the classic Thomistic doctrine on charity. St. Thomas devotes question 26 of the Secunda Secundae to this exact point. He establishes there that the love of charity, even being universal in its object, is hierarchized in its effective exercise: we are obliged to help the father before the stranger, the neighbor before the distant, the member of one’s own political community before the alien, except in cases of extreme necessity. *Magis tenetur homo subvenire patri quam extraneo cuilibet*. This is not a marginal gloss: it is the framework of Catholic moral theology on hierarchized obligations, collected by the entire subsequent tradition, from Suárez to the Scholastic manuals used in seminaries until half a century ago. When Vance cited this principle in January 2025 to justify a national priority policy, progressive American bishops and then-Cardinal Prevost responded with a slightly hasty tweet that he later deleted. But the problem is not that tweet. The problem is that the Thomistic doctrine of the *ordo caritatis*, when read in its entirety, gives reason to Vance in the essentials: there is a hierarchy of obligations, and belonging to a political community generates positive duties from which strangers do not participate. Universal charity does not annul the hierarchy: it presupposes it.
What Argüello does is invert the order. For him, the traditional doctrine must be «overcome» by virtue of a novelty: «that in addition to dignity being universal, the common good is no longer only local». From there he deduces that the common good also has a global dimension that would oblige relativizing national priorities. The inference does not hold. The common good, in classic Catholic doctrine—Suárez, Leo XIII in *Rerum Novarum*, Pius XI in *Quadragesimo Anno*, Vatican II itself—has a primary reference to the concrete political community. Pontifical subsidiarity, explicitly formulated by Pius XI, presupposes that lower instances—family, municipality, nation—have their own competencies that superiors cannot absorb without denaturing them. Speaking of a «global common good» that replaces or degrades the national common good is dissolving the concept until it is left operationally empty, because no concrete political subject is in a position to pursue it. The maneuver recalls that of the husband who, faced with his wife’s claim, responds that he loves all humanity: technically true, practically irrelevant.
Sixth piece: the instrumental use of Leo XIV. Argüello cites the Pope to buttress his position. But the citation is selective. Leo XIV, on the return flight from Equatorial Guinea on April 23, said two things that Argüello reproduces partially. The first, that the North must question what it does so that young people find a future in their countries. The second, literally: «a State has the right to establish norms at its borders. I do not say that everyone should enter without order, sometimes creating in the places they go to situations more unjust than those they have left behind». The second part—the one that recognizes that disordered immigration can generate greater injustices than those fled—Argüello omits completely. Argüello’s Leo XIV is a Pope of a single phrase, cropped and oriented toward his thesis. The real Pope is quite more nuanced, and his position, even being critical of Trump’s aggressive migration policies, contains explicit recognitions of the State’s right to order flows that in Vox’s mouth would be disqualified as xenophobic.
Seventh piece: the analogies that wrap up the discourse. Argüello compares migratory tension with tourist tension: there are saturated areas, there are neighborhoods that protest about cruises, but we continue to say that tourism is vital for GDP. The comparison is rhetorically comfortable and argumentatively useless. The tourist pays for what he consumes, does not access the public health system under resident conditions, does not school his children, does not generate permanent demand for social housing, and leaves. Migration, especially irregular, raises questions different in nature, not just in degree.
Even more surprising is the analogy with the hantavirus ship, the MV Hondius, which arrived in Tenerife last Sunday and whose fourteen Spanish passengers are now serving a 42-day quarantine at Gómez Ulla Hospital. Argüello intends to illustrate with this episode that «there have also been tensions there» between caring for the sick and caring for the health of those who welcome. The example plays exactly against him. What the hantavirus episode demonstrates is that the Spanish State, faced with a rated health risk, has activated strict protocols, has imposed quarantines on its own citizens, has coordinated international evacuations, and all of this without anyone invoking the inalienable dignity of the passengers to prevent it. When there is an identified superior good—in this case, public health—the State has both the right and the obligation to restrict movements. That Argüello chose this example precisely, two days after the disembarkation, suggests either a notable argumentative distraction or an excessive confidence in the audience’s inability to process the implication.
Eighth piece: the choreography of the dialogue. Argüello closes by assuring that «the Church’s availability to dialogue with everyone is manifest» and lists its informal meetings with all parliamentary groups. The statement comes after a response in which Vox’s position has been characterized as «trap», as «partial reading», as theology contaminated by the MAGA movement. One dialogues with he who has previously been disqualified doctrinally; the table is offered to he who has been denied the principle. It is difficult to take seriously an invitation to coffee when the other party has cooked the menu and demands accepting the host’s theological premises in advance.
One matter remains that Argüello avoids, and that is worth mentioning to conclude: the question of institutional incentives. Abascal’s accusation that the Church «does business with immigration» is rhetorically brutal and technically imprecise, but it points to a verifiable fact: a substantial part of the welfare network that deals with migrant reception in Spain—Cáritas, several religious congregations, diocesan foundations—is financed with public and European funds whose amount is linked to the volume of people served. This does not turn the Church into a mafia nor its workers into mercenaries, nor is it a matter here of questioning the self-sacrifice of those who work in those services. But it does introduce an institutional asymmetry that makes it more complicated for bishops to pronounce on migration policies with the independence they preach. Argüello does not address the matter, he dismisses it as «offensive». The offense is understandable. The question remains pending.
The whole of the discourse forms, in sum, a rhetorically careful and doctrinally weak construction. It opens with an equidistance that dissolves every hierarchy of moral incompatibilities, only to immediately introduce a doctrinal incompatibility against the only interlocutor present. It is sustained on five pillars—the initial relativism, the semantic slippage from poor to impoverished, the false demographic attribution of the pull effect, the spurious structural causality trade-migration, and the dilution of the Thomistic *ordo caritatis*—that do not withstand rigorous examination. The Pope is cited selectively to present as authority what is a Spanish episcopal option. Dialogue is offered after having disqualified the interlocutor. And the only thing that would really matter to clarify is avoided: how it is possible to recognize the State’s right to regulate immigration, as Leo XIV literally does, and at the same time morally disqualify every concrete policy that seeks to regulate it. The incoherence is structural, not accidental. Until it is addressed, Vox’s reproach to the bishops—whether one agrees with it or not—will continue to have, at least on this point, more argumentative foundation than the episcopal response.